Interesting Visualization of Twitter

I stumbled across this site called Tori’s Eye which takes search input and visualizes tweets from Twitter using the search input. It’s an interesting approach to captivating user’s attention while also mind numbing to say the least of watching little birdies flash across the screen. It’s something my 3 year old daughter would love.

 

I think something like this would be a great teaching and communication capability for K-12…especially for 3rd grade and lower. This would be a great way for teaching children to interact with computers, while also demonstrating time based data.

There’s a similar audio experiment going on as well here of the same likeness.

Old Blog Series: Different Ways to Look at Problems

This is taken from my old internal blog…I’m slowly moving this stuff over here:

For the last few weeks, I’ve been introducing different ways to visualize our work. For example Apdex, Lego Blocks, state models, the NG reference architecture and pipelines . I’m a fairly visualized learner, so I tend to be a more effective learner when I can present a picture or diagram. I tend to be a better communicator when I can work with a picture or diagram, rather then bulleted or narrative text.

Some of you have had the pleasure of reviewing the MIT Timeline project (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/) I passed on a few weeks back, as well as another example called Gapminder (http://tools.google.com/gapminder/) that I forwarded on earlier today. If you haven’t seen either of these, please take a look. They are highly effective visualizations for understanding sequential and spacial data representations. We could use these tools within our own practice for materializing performance and scalability models, correlating multi-dimensional data representations, as well as digesting massive quantities of data.

Which gets me to why I wrote this email. I came across this site (http://infosthetics.com/), well it’s more a blog then anything about using visualization. The sole mission of the site is to comment or identify visualizations of a concept or data. For example, take a look at http://themulife.com/?p=553 or http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/01/2007_trend_map.html.

I would like to see how we can represent data (single and multi-dimensional) via correlations in a more abstract manner. Writing 20 page reports, bulleted power points and massive spreadsheets simply doesn’t do an effective job of representing our work.

I’m interested in your thoughts …

Steve

Old Blog Series: More Ways to Look at Numbers

This is one of my old blogs that I’m moving over to wordpress from April 01, 2007:

Eureka…Eureka said Archimedes when discovering the principle of buoyancy. Well, I’ve had a similar moment myself. A few weeks back, I blogged about different ways to look at problems back in February. As part of that blog, I added the RSS feed for infostetics.com. This past month infostetics.com posted a very interesting blog about an acquisition Google made. Two very interesting sites were showcased in the Blog: swivel and Many Eyes. Coincidently, Many Eyes is an IBM Alpha Works sites. It’s pretty cool. They site allows you to upload up to 5mb of your own data and create your own visualization sets.

swivel looks to be the more advanced of the two sites and one that closely integrates with Google. My early thoughts are that we could create some interesting Apdex visuals, as well as PAR visuals from swivel by integrating our data points with Google Spreadsheets.

Take a look…you will definitely enjoy!